Abstract:

Recorded lectures are playing an increasingly pronounced role in modern academic education. This was demonstrated in a course at TU Delft with 550 students. Only around 15% opted to follow the lectures live in the lecture room, with its options for interactions with the lecturer. Another 15% preferred to follow the lectures either live via an internet connection or on demand later that day. Both of these groups followed the weekly scheduling of this course. The majority used the recorded lecture as an exam preparation aid. All lectures were viewed on demand some 300-400 times. A large part of these views occurred during the days preceding the exam.
Recorded lectures can be distributed via popular platforms such as iTunesU and YouTube EDU. The latter allows for online translated subtitles, which is considered a very useful tool for the international students at TU Delft.

Future developments for recorded lectures were investigated in an MSc research project in Computer Science at University of Twente. It was shown that the word correctness of modern speech recognition is around 50%, which is insufficient for direct use as subtitling, but rather appropriate for search engines. A prototype for such a search engine over a full course has been developed based on lecture titles, chapter titles, slide data, transcripts, subtitles and speech recognition output. An online time framed discussion board was reviewed, showing that in these discussion boards’ student-to-student interactions might be more intensive than student-lecturer interaction.
Introduction of recorded lectures allow for a much more flexible scheduling of courses, either multiple times a year, as well as in intensive short courses.

The developments of recorded lectures at TU Delft show their large potential in international education.

Keywords:

Recorded lectures, international education, OpenCourseWare, water management, drinking water engineering.